Weekly Poem: ‘Massacre’

By Liao Yiwu, Translated by Wenguang Huang(Composed on the morning of June 4, 1989)Dedicated to those who were killed on June 4, 1989Dedicated to the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution

Leap! Howl! Fly! Run! Freedom feels so good! Snuffing out freedom feels so good! Power will be triumphant forever. Will be passed down from generation to generation forever. Freedom will also come back from the dead. It will come back to life in generation after generation. Like that dim light just before the dawn. No. There’s no light. At Utopia’s core there can never be light. Our hearts are pitch black. Black and scalding. Like a corpse incinerator. A trace of the phantoms of the burned dead. We will exist. The government that dominates us will exist. Daylight comes quickly. It feels so good. The butchers are still ranting! Children. Children, your bodies all cold. Children, your hands grasping stones. Let’s go home. Brothers and sisters, your shattered bodies littering the earth. Let’s go home. We walk noiselessly. Walk three feet above the ground. All the time forward, there must be a place to rest. There must be a place where sounds of gunfire and explosions cannot be heard. We so wish to hide within a stalk of grass. A leaf. Uncle. Auntie. Grandpa. Granny. Daddy. Mummy. How much farther till we’re home? We have no home. Everyone knows. Chinese people have no home. Home is a comforting desire. Let us die in this desire.OPENFIRE, BLASTAWAY, FIRE! Let us die in freedom. Righteousness. Equality. Universal love. Peace, in these vague desires. Stand on the horizon. Attract more of the living to death! It rains. Don’t know if it is rain or transparent ashes. Run quickly, Mummy! Run quickly, son! Run quickly, elder brother! Run quickly, little brother! The butchers will not let up. An even more terrifying day is approaching.OPENFIRE! BLASTAWAY! FIRE! IT FEELSGOOD! FEELS SOGOOD! . . . Cry cry cry crycrycrycrycrycrycry

We stand in the midst of brilliance but all people are blind. We stand on a great road but no one is able to walk. We stand in the midst of a cacophony but all are mute. We stand in the midst of heat and thirst but all refuse to drink.

In this historically unprecedented massacre only the spawn of dogs can survive.

Liao Yiwu is a writer, musician and poet from Sichuan, China. He is a critic of the Chinese regime, for which he has been imprisoned, and the majority of his writings are banned in China. In addition to his new memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese Prison,” Liao is the author of “The Corpse Walker” and “God Is Red.”

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